Detection of Diffusion-Generated Images Using CBAMEnhanced Pre-Trained CNNs

AI-generated images have amplified the need for effective methods to distinguish between real and synthetic visuals. This underscores the need to develop new approaches to ensure data integrity and combat misinformation. While the existing literature predominantly focuses on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN)-based synthetic images, researchers have largely overlooked the detection of diffusion-based models. This study fills this gap by demonstrating the potential of convolutional block attention module (CBAM)-enhanced convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the effective detection of diffusion-based synthetic images. In this study, we use CNNs enhanced with the CBAM to propose a novel approach for detecting synthetic images. The CBAM-enhanced model, trained on the CIFAKE dataset, achieved a remarkable accuracy of 97.38% in detecting synthetic images. We integrate pre-trained CNN architectures, such as ResNet50 and DenseNet121, with a CBAM attention mechanism, which enhances performance by focusing on salient spatial and channel information. This approach presents a model that significantly enhances the detection capabilities for distinguishing fake images. Our findings contribute to the field of deepfake detection by providing a robust solution for automated digital image vetting, with implications for AI ethics, security, and broader societal discourse. The implementation details and source code are available at https://github.com/cmpe-dev/Fake-Detector-with-CBAM.